Swedish Prosecutor Håkan Roswall announced his intent to press charges against The Pirate Bay before January 31, 2008, on the grounds that it is suspected of facilitating copyright infringement. Specifically targeted are five individuals associated with The Pirate Bay, only two of which are known at this time.

Rowswell expects that the charges will be backed up by evidence May 2006 raid that resulted in the seizure of 180 servers at TPB’s hosting center and knocked the site offline for several days.

The Pirate Bay, however, does not think that Roswall will be successful in his attempts, as the site maintains that it is merely a search engine and does not actually host any of the infringing materials in question. Further, a recent leak regarding the May 2006 raid reveals that the Swedish police have little to no evidence in supporting Roswall’s claims or any other wrong-doings.

Responding to Roswall’s May 2007 statements, TPB administrator Tobias Andersson accused the Swedish police of needing to save face, noting that TPB “expected” to face charges. “Of course we don't think they will succeed,” he said, “I think they feel they have to do it. It would look bad otherwise since they had 20 to 30 police officers involved in the raid … we will most likely be cleared as it is obvious that there is no copyrighted material on the site, there are just links to other places.”

“Whatever the outcome, we will continue,” said Andersson. “If we are outlawed in Sweden we will continue elsewhere. There will be no downtime.”

sealand is an abandoned RAF outpost outside of british territorial waters. it is really just a concrete tower. in order to actually get high-speed servers set up there they would have to lay cables from britain, and if the british didn't like the whole piracy thing they could just cut them off... so tiny and its own country it may be, but that does not make it self-sufficient.

Sealand actually already has internet service, as shown by HavenCo's operation on the platform for the last few years. Even if the UK did sever its land based telco lines, this could easily be circumvented through the construction of a simple satellite uplink. Cut the power links? Wind/solar/tidal generators could easily be installed to power a small datafarm.

Thats the beauty of Sealand... as of today, the UK seems to have shown no real effort to shut down Sealand. But outside of physically claiming the island in an international court as its soverign territory (which they could probably do if they really wanted to), Sealand would be very dificult to shut down.

Trust me, im well versed in the history of Sealand ;) ... like I said, the UK has never made a REAL effort to shut Sealand down. If there was enough political pressure, it would be gone within a week. But as of yet? There hasnt been any significant interest on the part of the UK to shut it down.